Corrupted C#n#m#

Start: 2009-11-20 00:00 US/Eastern

End: 2009-12-20 00:00 US/Eastern

Corrupted C#n#m# is Angelo Vermeulen's new solo exhibition in the US after his Biomodd [ATH1] project at the Aesthetic Technologies Lab in Athens, Ohio in 2007. Corrupted C#n#m# is an experimental cinema project that explores the physicality of digital media, and draws upon the phenomena of data corruption and data forensics. It's an artistic inquiry into the notion of the material 'body’ in both the digital and the biological realm. Video images stored on different types of digital media are manipulated and disrupted through various biological processes. In a series of highly aggressive setups, storage media such as hard drives, memory cards and digital tape are exposed to bacteria, fungi, algae, insects etc. The damaged video data are then meticulously recovered by data forensic techniques, and by transplanting affected components such as hard drive platters into ‘uninfected’ hardware units. In an iterative process, the retrieved data are exposed over and over again to the disruptive biological processes. During this 'degradation' process, data errors emerge as faulty lines and pixels, broken images, color shifts and other artefacts.

Source material is surgical footage stored on former generation media such as VHS, Betamax and CD-ROM. Using and (re-)digitizing found footage is integral to the project and draws upon notions of instability and conservation. The use of surgical video creates a layered narrative of shifting embodiments and translations: the dissected human body ‘contained’ on older and analog media is digitized on magnetic hard drive platters, and subsequently reworked by other biological bodies in a non-linear, dialectic process. The end result is a reconfigured and mutated body.

The exhibition consists of an ongoing installation setup surrounded by projections and video screens. In the installation, work benches with sequential series of hacked hard drives are the central focus. Biological experimentation takes place in the same installation, and is an ongoing process during the exhibit. In essence, the project debunks the myth of the so-called immaterial nature of digital art production.